Stop me if you heard this one... "Union Pacific Corp (UNP.N), the No. 1 U.S. railroad company, owns a 26 percent stake in Mexican railway company Ferromex. ... Like rivals CSX Corp (CSX.N) and Norfolk Southern Corp (NSC.N), Union Pacific is partnering with Kansas City Southern to haul carloads in the United States to locations not served by the rai... (Read More)

Well I do not see an Atlas Shrugged scenario anytime soon because the world is on a global capitalist trajectory. However, Hugo Chavez was a surprise. Even as the old line socialist states such as the UK and Norway have realigned, they still maintain deep traditions of intervention, as for instance, the call now in the UK for regulation of newspapers. Right now, also from the UK and Europe, are complaints that Amazon, Google, and others are "cheating" governments out of taxes. Meanwhile, an amusing, ideologically confused opinion story on the homepage of Pravda.ru called the USA "communist" pointing to our shady elections, the two-party dictatorship, and to our abandonment of capitalism under the Obama Administration.

Whether or not we are on a global trajectory towards capitalism depends on when you point to the starting point, how you weight current events, and what you see as the key drivers in this movement.

Clearly there are serious problems in direction that we see now in the united states which historically has been the well-spring of capitalism.

I'd say that the world has lost much of the moral grasp of capitalism's nature. Some of the world has gone towards a state capitalism, but that's more like an accidental capitalism, an artificial capitalism, and likely a temporary capitalism since isn't founded on sound ideological grounds, or implemented in structures that are there for the purpose of sustaining freedom... as we once had but now are just history of shadows of what they once were.